gwern comments on Mixed Reference: The Great Reductionist Project - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (353)
I am finding the same problem with all articles in this sequence that I find with the explanation of Bayes' Theorem on Yudkowsky's main site. There are parts that seem so blindingly obvious they don't bear mentioning.
Yet soon thereafter, all of a sudden, I find myself completely lost. I can understand parts of the text separately, but can't link them together. I don't see where it comes from, where it's going, what problems it's addressing. I find it especially difficult to relate the illustrations to what's going on in the text.
I seldom have had this problem with the blog posts from the classical sequences (with some exceptions, such as his quantum physics sequence, which left me similarly confused).
Am I the only one who feels this way?
EDIT: upon reflection, this phenomenon, of feeling like there was a sudden, imperceptible jump from the boringly obvious to the utterly confusing, I've already experienced it before: in college, many lessons would follow this pattern, and it would take intensive study to figure out the steps the professor merrily jumped between what is, to them, two categories of the set of blindingly obvious things they already know and need to explain again. Maybe there's some sort of pattern there?
Ah yes. Have you read about 'inferential distance' yet? :)
Yes, I knew about them. I try to shorten them it in everything I do, from my vocabulary register to the concepts I use, which I try to make as rent-paying and empirical as possible. It's heavier work than I foresaw.
This has moved me from "impossible-to-understand nerd who talks down to you from an impenetrable ivory tower" to "that creepy guy who talks in punches and has strange ideas that make sense". Or, if you will, from a Sheldon Cooper to a coolness-impaired Tyler Durden. Socially, it wasn't a big gain.